When an inveterate collector begins to feel overwhelmed in his New York apartment, he turns to a high-school friend to transform the space into an orderly world of wonders.

When most people embark on a journey, they begin by leaving the house. But for Jason Rand, adventures are just as likely to occur when he comes home. "He prefers to be in a world of his own making," says interior designer Alexandra Loew. "He's a total aesthete and artist, and his temperament is so sensitive." To design Rand's Manhattan apartment, Loew envisioned him as a Proustian character inhabiting a rich and exotic retreat. "I wanted to create a space where he'd feel cloistered and protected, as well as stimulated and satiated."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Her impulse to nurture his disposition has deep roots: The pair were best friends as suburban teenagers and became regulars on the underground club scene. "We crawled through New York City together as high schoolers," says Loew. Rand adds, "Everyone else was at a kegger in somebody's backyard, and we were hanging out in SoHo." Clubs were fantasy worlds, complete with themes and costumes. "We began to understand creativity as our way out," Loew says.

Then college happened. Loew went off to Chicago, Rand to Boston. "We drifted," says Rand, "as people did in the era before Facebook." Rand eventually returned to New York, where he purchased a 900-square-foot apartment in an 1890s building near Gramercy Park, with original exposed beams and rails. There, he began accumulating stuff—more and more of it. He was especially drawn to vessels in all shapes and sizes, and to horses and satyrs—"I've always been fascinated by mythology and the fantastic hybrids of man and beast," he says. He also began collecting artwork: gouaches, prints, and paintings. His work as a creative director for media companies eventually led him to Harrison Rand, the ad agency founded by his grandfather in 1941.

Loew, meanwhile, landed in Los Angeles, where she began making a name for herself as an interior designer. Then one day, nearly 18 years after losing touch, they reconnected. "Our lives had charted in this parallel manner," says Rand. "She came and visited, and we had so much to talk about." The friends planned a trip to Paris, where they spent 10 days of "total immersion," he says. "That was the beginning of this process of reimagining my life."

[embed_gallery gid=2529 type="simple"]

For Loew, a top priority was to come up with artful ways of organizing and displaying Rand's profusion of things. For his artworks, she designed a hanging system of copper piping and thin chains that echoes the apartment's industrial elements and allows Rand to layer pictures everywhere, even over doors. "The chains clip at the top of the pipe, so he can change his art without putting nails into the walls," she says. Shelves in every room allow him to display his vast collection of objects.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

To the palette, Loew introduced bright pops of blue—Majorelle blue, French blue, turquoise—to balance the somber rusts and browns. Deep windowsills had been built to hold a jungle of plants. "Luckily for me, my plants have thrived here," says Rand, who traces his love of green things to his 1970s childhood. "They've created this kind of oasis, an Orientalist fantasy of a garden."

Above all, Loew strove to bring a sense of intentionality to Rand's collections, to give them a point of view. "I wanted a certain decadence to come through," she says. "But I wanted it to tell a coherent story." The effect is not unlike a cabinet of wonders—but Rand's collections are not mere aesthetic curiosities. Point to any object, and he's liable to embark on a story about how he acquired it—the moment he found three chairs upended in the back of a pickup on the way to the dump, or spied a mahogany cabinet inside a dark truck parked near a flea market. "I saw the reflection of the sun in triplicate, rolling and rolling and rolling across the front of this thing," he says. "I ran over. Strapped inside the truck was a breakfront with four doors, each set with three convex panes of glass. My mind was blown. I bought it on the spot."

[embed_gallery gid=2529 type="simple"]

The cabinet, which now serves as a bar, inhabits the apartment's foyer, a room Loew clad in silk burlap. "Alexandra really figured out how to make that room work," Rand says. "It never could find a voice before she came along. Now when I walk in, I'm like, Ahhh, I'm home. It immediately sets the tone for everything."

These days, Rand is not the only one to experience the thrill of entering his world. He frequently hosts salon-like parties and basks in his guests' enjoyment of the apartment. "People always tell me that they feel very at ease here," says Rand. "They used to walk in and go, 'You have so much stuff,' almost in a sneering way. Alexandra validated that it was OK for me to have this density, this mess."

Indeed, Loew has done more than validate her old friend's way of life. She's embraced it. "I think my motto this year is beautiful mess," she says. "Picasso's studio never looked ugly. Life is messy; we should embrace it."

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
ELLE Decor participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.